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294 A F R [C A
4. Sheila S. Walker, "Women in the Harrist Movement:' in BennettaJules-Rosette;.i
New Religions ofAfrica (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1979), pp.
5. For a compelling
and detailed reading of the evolution of popular theater in � region of Zaire, see Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic � through Proverbial WIsdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison: University �
Press, 1990).
6. Chris Dunton, "Slapstick in Johannesburg," West Africa, 18-24 Apri11994,
7. Eckhard Breitinger, "Agitprop for a Better World: Development Theater-A
Grassroots Theatre Movement," in Raoul Granqvist, ed., Signs and Signals: PEln"I..", in Africa (Stockholm: UMEA, 1990), pp. 93-120.
8. For a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the cinema industry in �
postcolonial Africa, see Manthia Diawara's
African Cinema (Bloomington: �
sity Press, ] 992). My discussion of the cinema in Africa has drawn heavily from this � source.
9. Chris Stapleton and Chris
May, African Rock: The Pop Music ofa Continent �
Dutton, 1990), p. 5. �
10. Quoted from John Collins,
West African Pop Roots (philadelphia: Temple
Press, 1992),
p. 91.
11. Paul J. Lane, "Tourism and Social Change among the Dogon," African Arts
(1988): 66-69, 92.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cole, Herbert M., and Doran H. Ross. The Arts ofGhana. Los Angeles: Museum of'"
History, 1977.
Diawara, Manthia.
African Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Fabian, Johannes.
Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through
Wisdom
and Theater in Shaba, Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Jegede, Dele. "Popular Culture and Popular Music: The Nigerian Experience."
Africaine 144, no. 4 (1987): 59-72.
Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1
Stapleton, Chris, and Chris
May. African Rock: The Pop Music ofa Continent.
Dutton, 1990.
Vogel, Susan.
Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: The Center
Art, ]991.
African Arts and West Africa are two additional sources in which articles on various popular arts in Africa can be found.
Eileen Julien
African Literature
"Truth depends not only on who listens but on who speaks." -Birago Diop "Always something new from Africa." -Rabelais
1 When most Americans and Europeans use the expression
"African literature," what they mean is poetry, plays, and narrative written by Africans in English and French, and perhaps Portuguese. This chapter will focus primarily on these texts, sometimes referred to as "Euro-African," which are particularly acces sible to Americans because of language and shared recent history. But it is not possible to speak or write ofAfrican literature as homogeneous or coherent, any more than this claim can be made for the varied texts that constitute European literature.I Africa is a vast continent, consisting of more than fifty nations and several hundred languages and ethnic groups. And despite many cultural similarities across the continent and a virtually ubiquitous history ofimperialism and neocolonialism, there are many African experiences and many verbal expressions of them. Moreover, to see what we are calling African literature in proper perspective is to recognize from the outset both that it is a gendered body of work and that it represents but a fraction of the verbal arts in Africa. There is a vast production ofAfrican-language literature and oral traditions, which is largely unknown and ignored by those outside the continent.
Indeed, verbal artistic traditions, literary
as well as oral, are ancient in Africa.
Centuries
before European colonialism and the introduction ofEuropean languages, there were bards and storytellers, scribes, poets, and writers in languages such as Kiswahili and Amharic. Many of those traditions adapt and live on in various guises today, and the African writers who will be considered in this chapter draw on these indigenous oral and written traditions as well as those ofEurope, the Americas, and A sia.
Understanding
ofAfrican literature has changed tremendously in the last twenty years, because of several important developments: the ever-increasing numbers of women writers, greater awareness of written and oral production in national lan guages (such as Yoruba, Poular, and Zulu), and greater critical attention to factors SUch as the politics of publishing and African literature's multiple audiences. These developments coincide with and have, in fact, helped produce a general shift in
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literary sensibility away from literature as pure text, the dominant paradigm for many years, to literature as an act between parties located within historical, socioeconomic and other contexts. Fiction, plays, and poetry by women from around the continent have been singularly important because they "complicate" the meaning of works by their literary forefathers, bringing those works into sharper relief, forcing us to see their limits as well as their merits.
There are many ways to divide the terrain
of literature written by Africans. These approaches reflect the fact that the continent is home to many different peoples and cultural practices, political and physical geographies, local and nonlocallanguages. Thus we routinely divide African literature by region (West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, Central Africa, southern Africa, each of which is more or less distinctive vironmentally and historically), by ethnicity (the Mande, for example, live across the region now divided by the states of Guinea, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, and Mali), or by nationality (a heritage of nineteenth-century European literary practice, whose merit in the African context is sometimes debated, and which privileges the force of national history and identity as opposed to ethnic or "African" determinants).
African literature
is also often categorized by language ofexpression (anglophone, francophone, Hausa, Swahili, etc.) or genre (poetry, proverb, narrative, drama, essay), or some combination of these. The field may also be examined in terms of themes or generations. These many approaches suggest not only the diversity and complexity of life on the African continent but also the stuff of which literature is made: language, aesthetic and literary traditions, culture and history, sociopolitical reality. This chapter, then, is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on selected themes and trends ofAfrican literature. The second briefly describes several contem porary debates surrounding this literature and challenges and prospects facing
African writers and readers
of African texts. Some reference will be made to oral traditions and literature in national languages. The third part of this chapter includes a discussion of selected authors and their works.
Themes and Trends
African literature is vast and varied, but there are two impulses or currents in African creative works of which we might make special note: the reclaiming ofvoice and subjectivity and the critique of abusive power.
Colonialism and Self-Representation
In the 1950s and 1960s,
as nations around the continent moved more or less slowly to achieve decolonization, many Africans took up the pen. There were indeed African creative writers, as well as essayists and polemicists, who wrote in European languages well before this time. But it is in this vast, concerted literary practice of African Literature midcentury that the moment of acceleration of contemporary African literature can be situated. African narrative and poetry, in the era immediately preceding and following formal declarations of independence, were born, for the most part, in protest against history and myths constructed in conjunction with the colonial enterprise. Writers struggled to correct false images, to rewrite fictionally and poetically the history of precolonial and colonial Africa, and to affirm African The implicit or explicit urge to challenge the premises of colonialism was often realized in autobiog or pseudo-autobiography, describing the journey the writers themsclves had away from home to other shores and back again. African intellectuals and writers felt keenly that "the truth," as Birago Diop had put it, "depends also on who speaks." In 1958, Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart. Characterized by a lan guage rich in proverbs and images of agrarian life, this novel and his later Arrow of God portray the complex, delicately balanced social ecology of Igbo village life as it confronts colonial power. Achebe's protagonists are flawed but dignified men whose interactions with British emissaries are fatal or tragic. Achebe, like other writers of those years, wrote in response to denigrating mythologies and representations of Africans by nineteenth-and twentieth-century British and European writers such as Joyce Cary, James Conrad, Jules Verne, and Pierre Loti, to show, as Achebe put it, that the African past was not one long night of savagery before the coming of Europe. Similar processes occurred, and still occur, within other traditions around the continent. The condemnation of colonial domination and the determination to bear witness are more urgent in the Portuguese-language poetry ofAgostinho Neto and the fiction ofJose Luandino Vieira, because ofAngola's long war of liberation. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels (Weep Not, Child, 1964; The River Between, 1965; and A Grain of Wheat, 1967) explore the many facets of individual Kenyan lives within the context ofcolonialism: their experiences ofeducation, excision, religious conflict, collective struggle, and the cost of resistance. A Grain of Wheat suggests, moreover, the coalescing of lives and forces in the making of historical events.
In his Death
and the King's Horsemen (1975), Wole Soyinka makes the colonial setting incidental, a mere catalyst, in what is the metaphysical crisis of a Hawed character, who is nonetheless the agent ofhis destiny and of history. Elesin, who must die in order to follow the deceased king to "the other side," sees in the intervention of the British colonial authority a chance to stay his death and indulge his passion for life and love. Through every theatrical means-drum, chanted poetry, gesture, and dance, as well as script-Soyinka suggests the majesty, the social significance, and the great personal cost and honor of Elesin's task, and then the magnitude of his failure.
A particular strain and manifestation
of anticolonialist poetry is the French language tradition known as negritude. It was in Paris of the 1930s, in the climate of modernism, surrealism, and jazz, that the idea of negritude arose. African and West Indian students, who were French colonial subjects, had come to the capital to complete their education. Products of colonial schools and assimilationist policies that sought to make Frenchmen ofthem, they had been taught to reject their African
299 298 AFRICA
cultures of origin and to emulate the culture of the French. Having experienced a far greater depth of alienation than those Africans schooled under British colonialism, they now felt the need to affirm those cultures from which they had been alienated, and they sought the means, both intellectual and literary, to rehabilitate African civilizations in Africa and the New World. The poetry of negritude grew out of this need to reaffirm "African values" and an African identity.
In 1948, Leopold Sedar Senghor published
Anthologie de La nouvelle poesie negre
et malgache (Anthology ofNew Black and Malagasy Poetry), in which he assembled the work of French-speaking Caribbean and African poets, each of whom had "returned to the source," composing poems out of the matrix ofAfrican culture. The tone and themes of negritude poetry vary from poet to poet. Birago Diop's majestic "Souffles" (best translated perhaps as "Spirits") seems to emanate self-assuredly from West African oral traditions and village culture, as it affirms traditional beliefs in the cyclical nature of life and in the ever-abiding presence of the ancestors. David Diop, on the other hand, vehemently and passionately denounces slavery and colonial domination.
There are two Africas in many
negritude poems: a utopian, pastoral Africa of precolonial times and a victimized, suffering Africa ofcolonialism. In both instances,
Africa is often represented metaphorically
as female, as in Senghor' s "Black Woman" or David Diop's "To an African Woman." Negritude poems tend also to juxtapose an Africa characterized by the communion of humankind and nature and a Europe characterized by the fragmentation and discord of life. Thus, Senghor, in "Prayer to the Masks," for example, emphasizes the complementarity of "Africa" and "Europe," but in so doing he ironically lends credence to notions of their supposed essential difference, a difference that then forms the basis of judgements of inferiority and superiority: Let us answer "present" at the rebirth of the World
As white flour cannot rise without the leaven.
Who else will teach rhythm to the world
Deadened by machines and cannons?
Who will sound the shout
of joy at daybreak to wake orphans and the dead?
Tell me, who will bring back the memory
of life
To the man
of gutted hopes?
They call us men
of cotton, coffee, and oil
They call us men
of death.
But we are men
of dance, whose feet get stronger
As we pound upon firm ground.
2 The anticolonial tradition within French-language literature thus often stressed the cultural dilemma of the assimile or contrasted two essentially different worlds.
Camara Laye's narrative
of childhood in Guinea, The Dark Child, is another example. Written under difficult conditions, when Laye was an auto worker in France, the narrative nostalgically constructs home as an idyllic space in which the figure of the mother, nature, and the joys and virtues of village life are fused. Cheikh Hamidou Kane of Senegal, in a philosophical, semi-autobiographical narrative, Ambiguous Adventure, adds to these contrasting paradigms of "Africa" and "the West" yet another layer ofopposition: the spiritual transcendence ofascetic Islam and the numbing preoccupation with material well-being, characteristic for him, ofAfrica the West respectively. But not all anticolonialist writers within the French tradition practiced confes narrative, stressing such oppositions. Sembeme's epic novel of the 1948 railway strike in French West Africa,
God's Bits ofWood, is a powerful anticolonialist
that moves beyond the opposition between two static moments or sets of values ("tradition" and "modernity" or "good" authentic ways and "bad" alien ones). Moreover, Sembene conceives of change not as the tragic and fatal undoing of cultural identity but as a means of achieving a more just society or as an inevitable process which is stressful but redeemed, perhaps, by its rewards. Thus, in Sembene's novel, the Bambara and Wolof abandon divisive definitions of identity based on ethnic group and caste and forge a larger and more powerful identification based on class. Under Sembene's pen, urban work and technology are disentangled from divisive ideologies, and the strike forces women and men to realize that the suppos edly private and feminine sphere of the kitchen and the public, masculine, and political sphere of the railroad are inextricably bound in one and the same space of deprivation and injustice. There is also a tradition of anticolonialist satire in both English and French. Okot p'Bitek's Song ofLawino heaps ridicule on the would-be assimile, while Ferdinand
Oyono's
Houseboy and The Old Man and the Medal and Mongo Beti's The Poor
Christ
of Bomba offer scathing portraits of the hypocritical and mediocre French colonial masters who are would-be bearers of "Civilization."
The Logic of Power, Wealth, and Capital
The critique
offoreign domination under colonialism and the concomitant, urgent issue of identity are often constructed as a conflict between the assimilation of "Western" ways and an African authenticity, and they are often articulated in realist narratives. With the advent of formal independence little by little throughout the continent, these issues gradually cede center stage to the disillusionment of indepen dence and the critique of abusive power and corruption. This critique was never absent from African literatures. It is fictionalized and unveiled even in Achebe's novels at midcentury. But the critique of postindependence regimes is accomplished in part by a change in literary form, which Ngugi wa Thiong'o suggests in his controversial essay
DecoLonising the Mind (1986):
How does a writer, a novelist, shock his readers by telling them that these [heads of state who collaborate with imperialist powers] are neo-slaves when they themselves, the neo-slaves, are openly announcing the fact on the rooftops? How do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters, robbers, thieves, when
300 AFRICA
they. the perpetrators of these anti-people crimes, are not even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and proudly their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of the nation? How do you satirise their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional Within the last fifteen years, then, the literary landscape has been strewn with quite fictions of failure, as Africans grapple with the new abuses of neocolonial regimes and seemingly inexorable global processes. The Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi, like his compatriot Henri Lopes, has given us compelling portraits of dictatorship. Labou Tansi's comic and nearly delirious fables (L'Etat honteux and La vie et demie) expose not only the corruption and savagery of these dictators but their frailly and insecurity. Ngugi's fictions (Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Matigari) signal the greed for wealth and power unleashed by "independence" and the betrayal of Kenyan peasants and workers by leaders who collaborate with international capitalism, when they do not vie with it These fictions cross over into the absurd and turn away from the realism that characterizes many first-generation narratives focused on colonialism. As Ngugi has suggested, writers invent new forms commensurate with the new and deeply troubling reality.
Revisions
The negritude poets defended the humanity of those whose humanity had been denied on the basis of race, a step that was unquestionably necessary, but what this quite often meant was an idealization of a precolonial past and the affirmation of an African or racial essence. Traits that were held to be "naturally" African-such as love of nature, rhythm, spirituality-that had been negatively valued, were now seen as positive. These particular representations of African identity and a racial or Pan African nation came and continue to come under attack by African intellectuals and writers, most notably Wole Soyinka (Myth, Literature and the African World, 1976) and, in sustained arguments, by Marcien Towa (Leopold SMar Senghor: negritude ou servitude?
1971) and Stanislas Adotevi (Negritude et negrologues, 1972). Like
wise, literary to and revisions of this perspective abound.
Yambo Ouologuem's
Bound to Violence is a chronicle of a fictional dynasty that is corrupt, barbarous, and politically astute, a fitting adversary, then, for the arrived French colonials. Ouologuem negates negritude's claim of precolonial goodness but seems rather to assert an inherent African violence.
A still more important
by women which has developed rapidly in recent years. What was HU"'"'W5, course, in the early chorus of voices denouncing the arrogance and violence of the various forms ofcolonialism were female voices. As recent writing by women makes clear, gender writing a particular cast. The "first generation" of male writers critique the imperial and colonial project for its racism and oppression, but they nonetheless (and not unlike the European objects of their critique) portray these
Literature 301
matters as they pertain to men, and they formulate a vision of independence or of utopias in which women are either goddesses, such as muses and idealized mothers, or mere helpmates.
In 1981, Mariama Ba's epistolary novel
So Long a Letter rocked the literary
landscape. At the death of her husband, Ramatoulaye writes a "long letter" to her divorced friend Ai'ssatou, now residing with her sons in the United States. Through the experience of writing, the heroine Ramatoulaye comes to terms with her own independence, having been betrayed by her husband of many years, who took as a second wife the girlfriend of their daughter.
Ouologuem's
Bound to Violence had already questioned the premises of black nationalism and of a "pure" time before colonialism. Bii's novel made clear that the nationalism and independence that these (by now) celebrated male writers had been defending were by and large patriarchal: women were symbols of the nation or, at best, helpmates of man, who alone would reap the real fruits ofindependence. In Bll.'s novel, which is imbued with its own prejudices, we nonetheless see a conflation of class biases, male vanity, and female complicity in the practice of polygyny. In this novel and her posthumous Scarlet Song, which describes the stakes and constraints in interracial or, more precisely, cross-cultural marriages, one can infer the gender biases of these early notions of nation and identity.
As with the French-language literatures
of Africa, a powerful force in English language literature is the emergence of women writers, who have filled the silences surrounding women's lives. Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966) suggests the tension be tween women's desires and the strictures of womanhood in the same era that male writers seemed to portray as the nearly golden age before colonialism. She concludes her novel with this haunting passage: Efuru slept soundly that night. She dreamt of the woman of the lake, her beauty. her long hair and her riches. She had lived for ages at the bottom of the lake. She was as old as the lake itself. She was happy, she was wealthy. She was beautiful. She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never experienced the iov of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her? Ama Ata Aidoo, in her early collection of short stories and sketches No Sweetness Here (1971), voice to women's concerns as they face problems of urbanization and Westernization: standards of beauty, the absence of husbands and fathers, prostitution. clashing values and expectations. In her most recent novel,
Changes
eXl)lOreS the meaning of friendship, love. mama!!:e. and familv for young women in
I,;UlllCllIIJUI
Bessie Head's fictions of village life in rural Botswana lay bare the mystifications of race, gender, and a patriarchal God. In a most moving scene in When Rain Clouds
Gather
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[PDF] Semester One : Lecture One : Introduction to African Literature 1